


We Were After Ever

by galfridian



Category: All Our Yesterdays - Cristin Terrill
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/pseuds/galfridian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After James's death, Finn and Marina try to move forward. But pieces of the erased timeline survive and begin seeping into the new one, invading her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Were After Ever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weasleytook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, Lisa! I'm so thrilled I got a chance to write for you this year. I hope you know how much I love and adore you!
> 
> Thank you to Lauren, Maura, and RJ for your help. You're champions for beta reading fic for a fandom you aren't familiar with...and for whipping this into shape.

The drain measures maybe five or so inches across. An ordinary, unremarkable shower drain, identical to all the others in the dorm, except for a little dent.

The drain has thirty-two holes. She counted them that first morning, trembling under lukewarm water. _Of course it's thirty-two_ , she thought at the time but didn't know why.

She shivers at the memory.

 

Marina's world – a small, naïve reality – collapses the morning Nate Shaw delivers the news of James's death. Hopes and fantasies evaporate. Reason and sense follow after.

“It's all right, Marina,” they say. Parents, therapists, even Nate. “Confusion is normal. It's difficult, isn't it, reconciling what you knew of James with his decision to end his life?”

But it isn't just the suicide that unsettles her. It's the fear that sometimes pierces her when she thinks of James.

It's the ghosts she sees in the people around her. Nate is the worst. The features he shares with James are weathered by years, a glimpse of a future no one will see. Sometimes, Marina looks at him and sees two dead men.

It's her parents, make-believing at normality and happiness, afraid a divorce will tip her over the edge. It's Tamsin and Sophie, gossiping about James's death, swapping tabloid headlines.

And it's Finn. She no longer tags on “the Idiot” after his name, except to tease him. If pressed, she might admit that he's helped her survive James's death. But some days, the weight of James's absence is too heavy, and she can't stand to look at Finn.

 

The years pass. Januaries feel less like beginnings and more like endings.

The first year, Marina lets Tasmin and Sophie throw a party in James's 'honor.' She gets black-out drunk and passes out on Tasmin's bed. She dreams of a low rumbling and a hum of energy.

Nate and Vivienne have a son. They name him James, unsurprisingly. “We're calling him Jamie,” Nate explains, grinning at his sleeping newborn. “James always hated that, you know.” Marina smiles, remembering his exasperation the first time she called him Jamie as a kid.

 

The second year, her parents suggest a trip to New York. They offer to pay for a hotel room. Marina sends Tasmin and Sophie without her. She borrows Sophie's car and drives to the Shaws' cottage on the Chesapeake. The cottage is dark, of course. No one has been here since James's death.

Marina sits in the car for hours, just staring at the cottage. She knows where the hideaway key is, but she can't find the courage to go into the place where James died.

Somehow, she isn't surprised when Finn arrives. She unlocks the passenger door for him and they brave the cold until after midnight. They trade stories about James. Her stories of a gangly, awkward James make him laugh. His stories make her cry – there's so much of James Shaw she never knew. Finn takes her hand, just like he did the day of James's funeral.

“One day, we'll be okay,” he says, brushing his thumb over her knuckles.

Her heart betrays her then, twists a little like it used to for James. Marina pulls her hand away, but her skin remembers Finn's touch.

 

They graduate. Finn defers college a year so he can help his mother. When Marina's roommate asks what she likes to be called, she finds herself answering, “Em.”

 

The third year, she spends a week on the Abbotts' sofa. Finn's mother has only days left now. Marina watches game shows with Finn's father while Finn sits with his mother. When it's his father's turn to sit with his mother, Marina and Finn watch his mother's favorite movies.

On the eighth day, Finn's mother dies. Finn and his father make the funeral arrangements, hardly speaking to each other, and Marina makes sandwiches and insists they get some sleep.

Two days later, Finn buries his mother. He stares at the ground the entire funeral service, like he's angry at the earth for taking his mother from him.

At the reception, he disappears. Marina finds him sitting on the edge of his mother's hospital bed. The bed has been stripped of its linens. Its bareness seems to accentuate Finn's loss. When he looks at her, there's an emptiness in his eyes that reminds her of James on the day of his parents' funeral.

“Em,” Finn whispers, and she sits beside him. This time, she takes his hand.

“We'll be okay,” she says.

They sit that way for an hour or so. Marina stares at photos on the wall across from them. She can't look at Finn; she's afraid of what she'll do to try to fill his emptiness.

 

The fourth year, she just wants to forget. On January 2, two days before the anniversary, she boxes up James's old notebooks and sends them to Finn. On January 4, Marina and her roommate move to a different dorm. Finn calls. She lets it go to voicemail.

That night, she has the first dream:

_A hospital hallway. Blood on James's tux, the one he wore to the fund-raiser. Outside the hospital, crouched behind a car, waiting. A gun in her hands, aimed at James._

She wakes with a jolt, too terrified to scream.

 

A few hours later, Marina is crouched in the shower, counting the holes in the drain.

 

A couple nights after the first dream, she has a second. A week later, she has a third. Soon, the dreams come every night.

Most are nightmares: Trapped in a dark prison cell, whispering to Finn through the vent in their shared wall. Running, sleeping in abandoned buildings and cars, learning to fire a gun. Fear. Pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at James. Nate unconscious or dead in a pool of his own blood.

But some of the dreams are beautiful: A porch overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, Finn's fingers in her hair. Escaping the prison cell. A trail of kisses from her forehead to her mouth.

It's those dreams that make it possible for Marina to sleep at all.

 

She can't tell Finn. She tries, but she doesn't know how to tell him that she's having dreams about lives they've never lived. So she keeps quiet, trying to understand what's happening to her.

Winter fades. The days grow longer. For a while, her dreams are mostly good.

 

By April, Marina she can't count the number of these dreams she's had. She can piece some of the dreams together, but mostly she feels like she's seeing little pieces of two different stories. It's impossible to see either clearly.

It takes one dream to change that; one dream to break her silence; one dream to send her speeding down the interstate in the middle of the night.

 

_There are two Marinas. One is younger, the age she was when James died. The other is older, weathered. James has a gun to the young Marina's head._

_But this isn't her James. This is another James, an older, more severe looking James, one who looks at Marina with hatred..._

_...an older Finn attacks her James. The older Marina tries to get the gun from the older James, but before she can, he shoots the young Finn in the chest._

_She watches, horrified, as young Finn dies and older Finn simply...vanishes..._

_...the young James puts the gun to his head. She screams, but it's too late._

 

If Finn is surprised to find Marina pounding at his door at four o’clock in the morning, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he takes her to a nearby diner and listens.

She recounts every detail she can remember from the dreams, including the kisses and the way her knees buckled in the last dream when he died. She confesses to Finn what she hasn’t admitted to herself until now: that these dreams have always felt more like memories, however incomplete or confused.

That’s when Finn tells her what he found in James’s old notebooks.

 

When Nate gave her the notebooks, she was grateful to have something of James’s to hold onto. But soon they became too painful to look at and so began gathering dust for years in the back closets until she sent them to Finn.

At first, he doesn’t find much – notes from lectures, formulas and equations that don’t go anywhere, homework – but then he comes across a formula James was obsessed with. When he starts looking, he realizes that this formula and others like it can be found in all the notebooks.

“I don’t understand much of it, of course,” Finn says. “But I think…”

“Oh my god.” Marina remembers it now, James swearing to find a way to fix everything. “Time travel.”

“I think he succeeded. I think a version of James finished those formulas. I think your dreams –”

“Really were memories.” Marina picks at her nail polish. “We were going to kill him. We were going to kill James.”

“But he did it instead.”

“To save us.”

“Em, what are we gonna do?”

The sun is rising behind Finn. He looks beautiful and Marina realizes it’s time to move forward. “We make sure his sacrifice isn’t wasted.”

 

They burn the notebooks, hoping they have the only copies of James’s formulas. When there’s nothing left but ashes, they put the fire out. Marina imagines the ashes being carried off by the wind, scattered and taken back into the universe.

Marina takes Finn’s hand. “We’ll be okay.”

“Yeah,” he says, “We will.” 

When he looks at her, the terrible emptiness she saw at his mother’s funeral is gone; instead, she finds love, hope...possibility.


End file.
